Yet the saddest unexplored contradiction in “The Gnostic Bible” is that of heterodoxy itself. Many of these writings are revoltingly pious, in the sense that within their own schemas, authority must not be questioned. Dogma and church power (or celestial power) rule. As in, you must do exactly as I say because I have the greater knowledge of the spiritual realm. Or, you must believe what I tell you because I am the superior luminary come to you from the ninth heaven (divine beings in the Gnostic texts often talk this way). Of course, Father, the lesser humans and acolytes in these texts reply. How can I escape my disgusting body? Frequently I had to put the book down because I could not take another brainless celebration of our truly good eternal Father (as I told you, they also believe in a good one) and how the stupid humans who don’t believe in him will be punished at the end of time.

The subject was revolutionized by the Nag Hammadi collection. These took more than thirty years to translate and publish, and the work of analyzing them and trying to understand their meaning and historical context began really in the 1980s, with major revisions of our understanding emerging only in the last ten years. Birger A. Pearson’s Ancient Gnosticism is one of the best summaries of our current knowledge about the Gnostics. William Barnstone and Marvin Meyer in The Gnostic Bible offer an exhaustive collection of the known Gnostic writings, grouped for the first time by the various Gnostic schools of thought, an essential aid in disentangling this difficult subject. Miguel Conner’s Voices of Gnosticism is a transcript of a number of radio interviews with scholars in the field, a light chatty overview. Richard Smoley’s contribution is a brief glimpse at the influence of Gnosticism on European esotericism down to our own day.

Yet the saddest unexplored contradiction in “The Gnostic Bible” is that of heterodoxy itself. Many of these writings are revoltingly pious, in the sense that within their own schemas, authority must not be questioned. Dogma and church power (or celestial power) rule. As in, you must do exactly as I say because I have the greater knowledge of the spiritual realm. Or, you must believe what I tell you because I am the superior luminary come to you from the ninth heaven (divine beings in the Gnostic texts often talk this way). Of course, Father, the lesser humans and acolytes in these texts reply. How can I escape my disgusting body? Frequently I had to put the book down because I could not take another brainless celebration of our truly good eternal Father (as I told you, they also believe in a good one) and how the stupid humans who don’t believe in him will be punished at the end of time.

In some ways, Gnosticism wasn’t radical at all. The hatred of sex and the body promulgated in most Gnostic works was even more intense than that of the mainstream church. But sometimes the Gnostics appeared to celebrate deviant sexuality — as with the Cathars, 11th to 13th century French Gnostics who, Barnstone tells us, thought sex outside of marriage was fine, particularly if it didn’t lead to conception. Yet he and Meyer avoid the questions this raises. Did this specifically mean that homosexual sex was OK? Did the Cathars think sex outside marriage was merely acceptable, or morally superior to married sex? And the editors of “The Gnostic Bible” simply never bring up the delightful claim, made by some historians, that the Bogomils, Bulgarian antecedents of the Cathars, were the original in-your-face buggers.

The Gnostic Bible - Cristianesimo - Panorama Auto

In some ways, Gnosticism wasn’t radical at all. The hatred of sex and the body promulgated in most Gnostic works was even more intense than that of the mainstream church. But sometimes the Gnostics appeared to celebrate deviant sexuality — as with the Cathars, 11th to 13th century French Gnostics who, Barnstone tells us, thought sex outside of marriage was fine, particularly if it didn’t lead to conception. Yet he and Meyer avoid the questions this raises. Did this specifically mean that homosexual sex was OK? Did the Cathars think sex outside marriage was merely acceptable, or morally superior to married sex? And the editors of “The Gnostic Bible” simply never bring up the delightful claim, made by some historians, that the Bogomils, Bulgarian antecedents of the Cathars, were the original in-your-face buggers.

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CD Version of The Pistis Sophia The Gnostic Bible Other Texts | eBay

Birger A. Pearson, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, is a distinguished scholar of Gnosticism and one of the translators of the Nag Hammadi Codices. (A codice is something between a scroll and a book. They are leather bound sheets of handwritten text.) The Nag Hammadi discovery was of fourth-century translations into Coptic of older Greek originals. There were twelve codices or volumes, containing forty-four separate documents, called tractates, plus eight duplicates. The best guess on their origin is that they were part of the library of a Christian monastery and were buried by monks who sought to protect them from destruction during an intolerant purge by their superiors. There are by now numerous editions in English. The earlier ones simply present the whole collection. Recent scholarship has shown that the texts, as one would expect from a library collection, are from different sources, not all Gnostic, and among the Gnostic documents, from different schools. This is easier to follow in the most recent collection, The Gnostic Bible , compiled by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, which includes materials from other sources beyond Nag Hammadi.

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The Gnostic BibleWillis BarnstoneNo preview available - 2003

Gnostic Bible Studies: From Genesis to Revelation

Which brings us to the most disappointing thing about “The Gnostic Bible”: Its failure to address what turns out to be the most interesting thing about the 15 centuries of Gnostic spirituality included here, the enormous contradictions among (and even within) these supposedly heretical, long-suppressed works. Gnosticism was stamped out — the texts literally burned, and their adherents tortured and murdered — by mainstream Christians and the orthodox of other religions, only partly because it was politically radical.

Gnostic Gospels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There is a lot of hidden esoteric gnosticism contained within the scriptures and below I have included some examples of gnostic bible verses in order to help you see the light of these secret mysteries such as in 1 Corinthians 2:7 - "But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory" and in John 8:32 - Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."